Black Sea (10 page)

And now, what will become of us without the barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

Constantine Cavafy, 'Waiting for the Barbarians'

ON THE SHORES
of the Black Sea, there were born a pair of Siamese twins called 'civilisation' and 'barbarism'. This is where Greek colonists met the Scythians. A settled culture of small, maritime city-states encountered a mobile culture of steppe nomads. People who had lived in one place for uncounted generations, planting crops and fishing the coastal sea, now met people who lived in wagons and tents and wandered about infinite horizons of grassy prairie behind herds of cattle and horses.

This was not the first time in human history that farmers had met pastoralists: since the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of settled agriculture, there must have been countless intersections of these two ways of life. Nor was it the first witnessing of nomadism by people from an urban culture: that was an experience already familiar to the Chinese on the western borders of the Han dominions. But in this particular encounter began the idea of 'Europe' with all its arrogance, all its implications of superiority, all its assumptions of priority and antiquity, all its pretensions to a natural right to dominate.

'Civilisation' and 'barbarism' were twins gestated and born in the Greek but above all in the Athenian imagination. They in turn gave birth to a ruthless mental dynasty which still holds invisible power over the Western mind. The Roman and Byzantine Empires sanctified their own imperial struggles as the defence of 'civilised' order against 'barbaric' primitivism. So did the Holy Roman Empire and the colonial expansions of Spain, Portugal, Holland,

France, Italy, Germany and Britain. By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as
przedmurze
(bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified 'barbarism' as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Centra! Asia and eventually the Chinese.

The gestation of the twins was a long one. The first Greeks reached the northern Black Sea coast and set up permanent trading-posts there in the eighth century BC But the encounter lasted for several hundred years before the Siamese twins were born — before 'different' came to mean 'inferior', and before the 'otherness' of the steppe peoples whom the Greeks met on the Black Sea became a mirror in which Greeks learned to see their own superiority. That event—a sudden conceptual leap — took place in Athens in the first half of the fifth century BC, as the Athens of Pericles beat off the Persian invasions and became itself an imperial power.

Athenian intellectuals, above all the playwrights, devised this change in the way that Greeks perceived other peoples and then they sold it to the wider public. The colonists themselves had little or nothing to do with it. Their ancestors were not from Athens or even from the Peloponnese, but were mostly Ionian Greeks from the islands and towns along the coast of Asia Minor. Anyway, they were obliged to be pragmatists if they were to survive out on the rim of the known world. It was not ideology which had brought them and their fathers through the Bosporus and across the Black Sea, but fish. Even by the seventh century, the Aegean city-states were beginning to exhaust the limited arable land around their walls, and it was hunger which drove their ships to the north and east.

At first, the colonists lived by the stinking, profitable trade of fish-processing. Some of their earliest settlements were at the mouths of the big rivers which empty into the shallow north-west of the Black Sea. Tyras and Niconia were built at the mouth of the Dniester, west of modern Odessa, and Olbia at the outfall of the southern Bug where it opens into the Dnieper estuary a few miles from the sea. These were the wrong sites to intercept the two main deep-water fish-flows of the Black Sea, the migrations of the
hamsi
and the bonito. But all three cities stood on the shores of
limans,
enormous fresh-water lagoons formed by these rivers before they meet the sea, and the early Greeks relied on easily netted river fish: sturgeon and salmon and shad and pike-perch. From these estuaries, the Dnieper delta especially, came abundant salt for curing.

Later, the settlers began to plant wheat for export. For almost three thousand years, until North American wheat conquered the world markets in the late nineteenth century, grain grown in the Black Sea steppe and shipped out through the ports of the north shore went to feed the urban populations of the Mediterranean and beyond: the Greek cities, Rome, Byzantium, Egypt, mediaeval Italy, even Britain in the years of the Industrial Revolution. By the time that Herodotus visited Olbia in the fifth century BC, the Greek colony had already persuaded Scythian communities around it to plough the earth and grow grain for the market. Many city-states, and above all Periclean Athens, became dangerously dependent upon imported steppe wheat for their bread.

Herodotus, for his part, was a relativist. He had spent some time in Athens, although he was an Ionian Greek by birth, and he seems to have been a friend of the tragedian Sophocles. But his
Histories
avoid the cultural supremacism which had become the fashion among Athenian dramatists. 'Everyone without exception believes that their own native customs are by far the best. . . there is plenty of evidence that this is the universal human attitude.'

In spite of his own views, Herodotus could not prevent his work being used as an ethnology-mine by nationalist writers determined to prove that barbarians were not just different but evil and degraded. And, in a much subtler fashion, Herodctus too was concerned to demonstrate that the non-Greek peoples were 'other' in ways which illuminated Greekness and Greek identity in a more brilliant, more flattering light. But Herodotus had actually visited and seen many of these other cultures, which the Athenian intellectuals had not. He would never commit the vulgarity of categorising them all indifferently as 'barbarians', or of demonising them as Aeschylus and Euripides were doing.

'People used to regard Herodotus as a historian, and doubt him. But now we should regard him as a politician — and believe him.'

So says the director of the Olbia excavations, Anatol Ilyich Kudrenlco. We stood outside the gates of Olbia - pseudo-Greek gates carved out of white concrete — and talked in the early spring sunshine. Mr Kudrenko, like most archaeological site-directors in Russia and Ukraine these days, is stranded and abandoned. The funds for excavation and museum maintenance and staff salaries which used to flow from the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and later from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, have dried up to a useless trickle. He is like one of the captains of the ships tied up and rusting alongside the quays at Odessa, immobilised because nobody can afford fuel. His ruins are defiled by abandoned hulks of agricultural machinery and collapsing sheds. Chickens peck among the shards of glossy black Greek ceramic. Peasants from the local collective farm rob the site so casually that they even leave their shovels in the pits overnight, ready for the next day's looting.

Mr Kudrenko believes that Herodotus was not only a traveller and a historian but also an agent in the service of Pericles. He visited the Black Sea coasts not because of his own independent curiosity, but because he was sent there as part of a Periclean campaign to persuade Athens that the city must expand overseas in order to guarantee its food supplies. Earlier, Herodotus had been associated with Pericles' scheme to found a colony at Thurii, in southern Italy, where he eventually settled and is probably buried. His job in the Black Sea, according to Kudrenko, was to arouse public interest in the Greek colonies there, especially those along the coasts of 'Thracia' and 'Scythia' on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea. The object was to justify Pericles in his project for a naval expedition which would put these cities under an Athenian protectorate, reinforce them against Scythian attacks, and seize control of their wheat trade. It was for this (Kudrenko argues) that Herodotus was awarded the enormous sum of ten talents by the Athenian
polis:
funds for imperial pioneering rather than a mere reward for writing an interesting book.

The Black Sea expedition sailed in
447
BC, and the Greek colonies — including Olbia — became part of the short-lived Athenian maritime empire. But Pericles was not simply a military liberator or conqueror; relations between the Greek cities and the Scythians had already become too complicated and interesting to allow that. Nor did he try to impose Athenian democracy on these dries, as Athens had done a few years earlier with the Aegean city-states which had fallen under its influence. Olbia (
'
Wealth City') had been a democracy of sorts until the emergency of Scythian pressure allowed a certain Pausane to establish himself as a peculiar 'elected tyrant'. Pericles, by diplomacy rather than force, negotiated a compromise which guaranteed Olbian political independence as an 'autonomous tyranny', but allowed the Scythian empire to retain part-control of the economy — it was by now the Scythians, rather than the Greeks, who organised the growing of wheat and the transport of furs and hides, and brought them down-river to the city. Democracy and full independence did not return to Olbia until some fifty years later, when both Athens and the Scythian empire were in decline, and even then its politics remained unstable. The citizens of Olbia were a small enfranchised minority in a population which may have become as large as
30,000,
and eventually two rich shipping dynasties, the families of Heroson and Protogenes, were in practice managing everything and imposing taxes which reduced many other citizens and merchants to debt and poverty.

But, even if Kudrenko is right or partly right, Herodotus was much more than a Cecil Rhodes of the fifth century BC In his book
The Mirror of Herodotus,
the French scholar Franqois Hartog deliberately turns his back on the old debates about whether Herodotus was accurate in what he wrote about Scythia and examines his
Histories
as a 'discourse of otherness'.

The centre of the
Histories
is the account of the Persian Wars: the ten-year struggle of Athens to beat off the Achaemenid kings of Persia who invaded the Aegean lands between
490
and
480
BC and were defeated at Marathon and Salamis, and the counter-attack of the Greek states under Athenian leadership which followed. In this supreme crisis of their existence, the Athenians had to ask themselves in a new way who they were, and what made the difference between them and their enemies worth dying for. Their eventual answer was an imperial one: a cosmic 'discourse of superiority
'
to the 'barbarians'. Herodotus could not go that far, but what he chose to say about the Scythians was intended to heighten his record of the Persian Wars - to define Athenian and Greek identity in the most graphic way possible, by contrasting it to mythic 'opposites'.

Nomadism, for example, was set up against Greek city-state patriotism which was about settledness, continuity, love of place.

As Hartog puts it: 'how did such people as the Greeks, who were forever declaring that city life was the only life worth living, imagine this figure of the Scythian, the essence of whose life was to keep constantly on the move?' The Athenians insisted that they were 'autochthonous' —biologically rooted in their own place. 'It is not hard to foresee that the discourse of autochthony was bound to reflect on the representation of nomadism and that the Athenian, that imaginary autochthonous being, had need of an equally imaginary nomad. The Scythian conveniently fitted the bill.'

But Herodotus, like some later classical writers, thought of nomadism as a military strategy rather than as a way of life which was the opposite of Greek settledness. His Scythians were inaccessible — in Greek,
aporoi.
Herodotus wrote: 'I do not admire everything about the Scythians, but in this supreme concern they have invented a system which means that nobody who attacks them can escape, and nobody can catch them if they do not wish to be found.' Instead of standing and fighting, they retreated into their endless land, leading the enemy on until he starved or despaired. As Hartog says, they inverted normal sense by making the hunter into the hunted. Instead of defending the walls of a city or capital against an invader, the Scythians simply dispersed. They had no city, not even the idea of a 'centre', for their only fixed places — like the royal tombs described by Herodotus which lay in the 'land of the Gerrhi', to which their kings were carried by wagon to be buried — were on the distant periphery of their realm.